I enjoy rambling about old towns. Going to an unknown place and glimpsing the lives of strangers. Walking around an old city is like a journey through time. I get a lot of pleasure from discovering remnants of times past, like a milk box outside an old house or a retro enamel sign tacked to the wall of a tiny shop.
I like this city in particular because you can take a winding route through it. In a big city like Kyoto, for example, the streets are laid out systematically like squares in a computer game, and having to follow them makes you feel overwhelmed and powerless. Or maybe it’s the flatness of the downtown district that does it. It can be surprisingly tiring to walk only on flat ground, with no change in your pace or breathing.
Oh yes, I’m sure that military and historical circumstances greatly influenced the development of this city’s layout.
See on the map how this hill is at the centre of the city and flanked on two sides by rivers. The city is a natural fortress, you see, surrounded by hills on three sides and sea on the other. It would be difficult to invade with a hilltop castle and the town on the slopes below, built around a network of narrow roads and slopes. Another thing about this city is that it has never been destroyed by fire, so the old layout remains to this day.
It’s a long time since I’ve heard the phrase destroyed by fire. As a child I often heard adults use it. Was that place ever destroyed by fire, they’d ask, or say in reference to such-and-such a place that it never burned. Of course I didn’t understand at the time, but what they were really asking was whether or not somewhere had been firebombed in the Second World War. Isn’t it horrifying to think it happened so many times that destroyed by fire and never burned became part of everyday speech?
III
I haven’t been here in a very long time. Not since I came on a school excursion. When you live near a famous sight-seeing spot, you hardly ever actually go there. Look how few people are here today. It’s too hot and humid even for tour groups. That’s good for us, though, we can take our time looking around. A lot of tourists come in winter, of course, to see the trees and shrubs all wrapped up to protect them against the snow. You must have seen it on the news.
But it’s obvious why this garden is known as one of the three great gardens of Japan. Just look at the size and scale of it, the variety of landscapes, and how meticulously it’s kept. The greenery here is also very striking, almost defiantly so, I always think.
Authority is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? Who would be able to create such an awe-inspiring place as this garden nowadays? Of course this is a wonderful achievement. It’s beautiful, a piece of cultural heritage to be proud of and necessary as a bastion of the Japanese spirit. But at the end of the day, it’s a garden, not something essential in the way that farms, or schools, or irrigation systems are. The powers that be who created this garden and maintained it for hundreds of years are beyond the understanding of ordinary people like us.
That’s right. Sometimes people get caught up in events beyond their understanding. They get ambushed under the guise of chance. Things happen and it seems as if they’re in another world or dimension. When something like that occurs, nobody can explain what’s really going on… Well, of course they can’t.
What do you think a person should do when they come across something they don’t understand? Should they reject it, pretend they never saw it? Be angry or resentful? Grieve or simply be confused? Those would be natural reactions, I suppose.
In my case, I moved to Nagano not long afterwards and apparently that was enough for me to get over it, being a child. I did in fact forget about the whole affair rather quickly.
Or so I thought, but in fact it was still with me, like a sediment that had settled deep down inside.
Recalling the events didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I hadn’t been directly involved. But as I grew older, every time I saw an injustice or something I couldn’t understand, I felt something surreptitiously stirring deep down inside, slowly working its way up from the depths. Over time this sense of unease built up and felt more solid.
I don’t remember what the trigger was, but one day I realized I had to do something about it. I knew I couldn’t go on with life as usual until I’d removed that accumulation of uneasiness. If I didn’t, I knew I’d suffocate.
I thought a great deal about it, about what I could do to bring everything to the surface.
Given how much I didn’t understand, I knew that realistically it could only be within the limits of my ability to comprehend.
Then I set about researching the subject, which I also did to the best of my ability and within the limits of my understanding.
That was how I chose to deal with it. I felt I had no other choice.
The result was The Forgotten Festival, which I wrote eleven years after the murders.
IV
This far in you can’t hear the traffic any more.
Cars, cars, cars, everywhere you go there are cars. Why are there so many cars on the road? Where’s everyone going? Sometimes I stop and think about it. Why is there so much traffic? See, as I said before, the roads in an old city like this are narrow. The traffic jam around the prefectural office here is always horrendous.
These cedars are magnificent, aren’t they? And the pines. Such a deep, dark green. More black than green, really. Green that verges on darkness.
Even the pond water looks heavy and stagnant in this heat.
Note how high above sea level it is. Piping water up here used to be a terrible struggle. Everybody knows the story of the local lord who had water diverted uphill from the river by an inverted siphoning technique, but every time I see this pond I remember the legend of artisans who were killed to protect the secret of that technology. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s the beauty of it – the fact that it seems likely.
Fear is a spice that lends credibility. Just the right amount sprinkled in any story makes it plausible.
That’s the kind of thing I remember.
An odd craze swept through my class afterwards. All the girls were doing it. Can you guess what it was?
Well, I’ll tell you. It was making pressed flowers. Yes, everybody was pressing Asiatic day flowers.
Apparently the glass used to weigh down the letter found at the crime scene had a day flower in it. I don’t know why, but for some reason everybody started to believe that day flowers were a charm against evil. Rumour had it that carrying a bookmark made from a pressed day flower would protect the carrier from being targeted by a homicidal maniac. So everybody went looking for day flowers to press. There was absolutely no basis to it, but a lot of strange rumours floated around at the time. The flowers had to be pressed in a telephone book, or a science textbook, or inserted into folded newspaper and placed under somebody’s futon, and if that person didn’t notice it was good luck – things like that. One girl I was friendly with gave me a bookmark and told me in all seriousness that I’d be safe if I kept it on me at all times.
Oh yes, they enjoyed themselves all right. Adults too, as well as the children.
Of course people were traumatized. I mean, it was unthinkable that something like that should have happened in the very city where we lived! The disruption to our lives was enormous. Fear spread like wildfire, and we were all on edge, jumping at shadows. It was as if we were in the grip of a feverish hysteria, brought on by living day after day in a state of high tension – something that normally you’d never experience in daily life. In my memories of that time, I have a distinct sense of being part of a major event.